When conveying articles in a co-mingled mass on a conveyor, such as a conveyor belt, it is often necessary to separate the articles into aligned parallel rows for conveying the articles in rows to a further processing station. More particularly, in bottle handling machines, separating the co-mingled mass of bottles on the conveyor belt into parallel aligned rows is necessary before the bottles are conveyed to a subsequent processing station such as a grid set used to load bottles into empty cases below the grid set, for example, as shown in applicant's prior U.S. Pat. No. 3,788,034.
Prior bottle handling machines such as the case packing machines shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,481,108 and 3,555,770, have utilized a plurality of parallel guide rail members for separating the co-mingled mass of bottles into aligned parallel rows. Quite often, however, the bottles become tilted on the conveyor and fall over in front of the guide rails causing the bottles to jam up in front of the guide rails necessitating the stopping of the conveyor and positioning the bottles upright by the machine attendant. On some machines the bottles become locked between two bottles and the end of a guide rail. Other problems concerning separating the bottles into parallel rows at the same speed at which the bottles are conveyed have been encountered with this type of device.